Though in every essential Japan’s higher education system is grounded on models imported and assimilated from the West, it has evolved for itself a kind of autonomy that now separates it from those very models. In the 21st century, it is possible for universities from overseas to have a presence in Japan that can and does bring modest successes, but also is faced with a variety of obstacles. This chapter reviews the early contributions made by Western institutions and personnel, regression during the years of extreme nationalism, and hesitant internationalization in recent decades.

Introduction

In the 150-year history of modern higher education in Japan, foreign universities have assumed three different forms. The first variety are schools founded by Christian missionaries for the most part in the latter half of the 19th century that were subsequently upgraded to the status of universities. The second consist of branch campuses of American universities, established during a period of rapid foreign expansion into Japanese higher education in the 1980s and early 1990s. The third are overseas studies programs mostly of US institutions that bring their own students from their home campuses to Japan for either a single term or a full academic year.

Of these three varieties, the first represents a successful albeit short-lived example of foreign influence on another country’s system of higher education, while the second is widely regarded as having been more or less a failure. Today there remain more than 100 colleges and universities founded by foreign Christian missionaries and their Japanese converts. About 30 of these can be counted among the country’s most prestigious private institutions.

Of the second group, only two have survived from some 40 US institutions, most of which were established in partnership with Japanese investors during the “bubble years” of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when cash-rich local governments and private entrepreneurs sought ways to allocate excess funds. Although most of these joint venture branch campuses collapsed when the bubble burst and their local partners could no longer support them, the two institutions that have remained, as well as one that was subsequently transformed into a Japanese-managed international university, have thrived.